RS232

I've been in the process of upgrading my backup/home media server for a few weeks now. I managed to get hold of an old case from a skip outside a closing down fax/photocopier company. It's a fairly decent case, although it was somewhat 5.25" centric in design. Amongst other things I did to modify this case, I replaced the old drive door with a new completely transparent one with some USB ports and an additional fan for cooling the new compliment of many hard disks. The server is going to be running in a cupboard without a monitor most of the time and I wanted to be able to see at a glance what the system was doing. Inspired by the computer-graphic imaginary servers that are featured in web hosting ads that have a screen on the front, I set about adding a little monochrome LCD.

A couple of minor updates you might be interested in. I got a quick demo echoing characters back to the PC working last week. This uses the interrupt on receive feature of the UART setup to trigger a send routine as soon as a character is received. The demo code is available on the Z80 Project page.